Double Visions, Double Fictions: The Doppelgnger in Japanese Film and Literature

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Double Visions, Double Fictionsanalyzes the myriad manifestations of the dopplegnger in Japanese literary and cinematic texts at two historical junctures: the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s and the present day. From psychoanalytic theory to Japanese detective fiction, Baryon Tensor Posadas reveals how the dopplegnger motif provides a fascinating new backdrop for understanding the enmeshment of past and present.

Reviews

"Double Visions, Double Fictions is a truly fresh contribution to Japanese literary and film studies by way of an ingenious examination of the doppelgnger. For Baryon Tensor Posadas, the doppelgnger functions not merely as a crafty aesthetic device, but as an actual conceptual practice mobilized by some of Japans most important modern writers and filmmakers."Eric Cazdyn, University of Toronto

"In Double Visions, Double Fictions, Baryon Tensor Posadas carefully traces the appearance and proliferation of the doppelgnger in Japan across various cultural and intellectual domains, including literature, cinema, and psychoanalysis. In his masterful analysis, the doppelgnger is not merely one figure among others, but rather, in its destabilizing effect on concepts of origin and imitation, one that highlights the core conflicts underlying modernity in Japan, including its fraught relation to the West and its emergence as a colonial power."Seiji Lippit, author of Topographies of Japanese Modernism

"The doppelgnger haunts, not only as a double but also through its multiple iterations. Approaching this uncanny figure as a form of a genre, Double Visions, Double Fictions takes us on an exciting intellectual adventure, tracing its recursions through various media forms and a broad span of historical periods in modern and contemporary Japan."Tomiko Yoda, Harvard University

"Double Visions, Double Fictions is a brilliantly written piece that sheds light on the impression the doppelgnger motif had on Japans film and political culture in the early twentieth century. "Film Matters

Author Bio

Baryon Tensor Posadas is assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures at the University of Minnesota and translator of The Sacred Era by Yoshio Aramaki (Minnesota, 2017).